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Sun Grid Compute Utility
jbltgz writes "The Register is reporting that the long awaited Sun Grid Compute Utility has been opened to the public. Now you can run your CPU intensive jobs on a grid of AMD Opteron-based Sun Hardware for $1 per CPU per hour for a fraction of cost, in a fraction of the time."
How long will it be until botnet operators start up a similar service? Or am I out of date and they have already done this? Anyway kudos to Sun for offering this service.
ZzzzSleep
Emerald Astrology
I wonder how long it would take for someone to port the POVRay engine to Sun's grid? At $1 per CPU/hour, this could be a boon for amatuer 3D graphics designers and the Internet Ray Tracing competitors. Use low res renders during testing, then pay Sun $25 to get your high quality result back in 20 minutes rather than the next day. Could be a lot of fun. :-)
Can anyone think of other good uses for the average (or not so average) home user? Perhaps new image compression formats that rely on Sun's Grid to get the best compression/quality tradeoffs through brute-force power?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The ability to but powerful computing time is a cool idea that has been featured in several sci-fi novels. However the article fails to mention exactly how powerful these Sun CPUs are. How much bang do you get for your buck? They also fail to mention how hard it will be to write code for this platform. Can I simply send them some standard C source, or will I have to code using some special extensions that will make my code totally unportable and thus lock me into buying more and more time from them?
Philosophy.
Is it like getting an account on someone's server and then being able to do whatever the hell compute-intensive work you want? I can't seem to find the relavent details, or my Parkinson disease is kicking in.
Click here to kick off a job on Sun's Compute Grid consisting of AMD Opteron-based Sun Hardware.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Wow, $1/CPU/hr. Same price as an MP3 off of iTunes, so it must be worthwhile, right?
OK, we are only about 3.5 months into the year of 2006, and lets look at some real data:
I run a few small to medium sized HPC clusters, and on one of them, here are the CPU hours used during 2006 -- 163,000+ this is on less than $500k of hardware that is years old. That would cost $163k just in computing time, not to include time to port applications, debug, etc.
Sun needs to be run by engineers and visionaries again, not by marketers. $1/CPU/hr is not going to do much better on those falling stock prices than selling $200 Linux PCs in Wal-Mart.
if it boasted a 64bit Java VM. A mate of mine does some very interesting research in number theory, and a few of his applications would need massive amounts of fast addressable memory. 64bit of address space would conveniently suffice, i suppose. Any suggestions on what else (cheap, or at least affordable) to consider using, anyone?
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Not completely unused, it has been up and running for over 6 months to selected customers who have been running Proof of Concepts and performing Engineering Development work.
I think Sun certainly started shouting about it too early, but this is the same service that was announced way back - Sun has finally got the technology/security/usability/stability/etc sorted out and gone live.
I thought that Sun already had their grid available and that no one wanted to use it because they would have to agree to be in a marketing campaign. Is this still the case? The terms of service on the network.com site redirects to an error page.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
If I could compile mencode/mplayer for Solaris I could upload my dvd isos and get sun to encode these for me in H264 for my HTPC.
I anticipate that each film would cost me ~$2. Not bad. Is that a safe bet? ANybody know what disk space they give for "personal files".
Now to explain to my ISP that I am not participating in illegal file sharing with +100GB per month of traffic is not going to be easy..
More seriously, I could use this to run some of my Monte-Carlo simulators..
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
That's 2.2 GHz per processor, times about a thousand processors or so. That's how modern supercomputers work. The processing nodes themselves are somewhat unimpressive, but they're built so that they scale really well, and deal with problems that are designed so as to be broken up into lots of little parts and solved simultaneously. So if you used all the processors on the machine for an hour, your bill (theoretically) would be $1,000.
... except that it has something like 12,000 of them.
The most powerful computer in the world right now, ASC Purple (it does nuclear weapons simulations for the USG), has 1.5 GHz RISC processors. Not exactly impressive, by today's standards
It's the infrastructure to get that many processors (and their associated dangly bits) talking to each other and working on the same problem efficiently that's expensive and nontrivial.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Back in the day, I worked for the World Bank writing software on IBM mainframes. Our department was charged back based on our usage. I worked in the telecommunications division and we, like the IBM division, charged departments for their telephone usage. To do this, we'd load the call logs into SQL and then create the bills from that. Our database contained millions of phone calls over the previous year+ of data.
During development, I made the mistake of doing an unqualified join between the primary call table and the table of departments (of which there were probably a few hundred. Pretty simple math... The result set was somewhere in the hundreds of millions to billions. I realized the problem the moment I submitted the job. Unfortunately, there was no way for me, a lowly user, to kill the job, once it began. By the time we managed to get the job killed, I had squandered thousands of dollars in computing charges. My boss was none too happy. Ah, the good old days...
Like seti or folding@home except instead of donating your spare cpu cycles for one particular task you'd be making them available for anyone to rent?
The price per hour per cpu could be based on demand and could be distributed to all the contributers. Imagine all the processing power out there not being used. Especially the gpus on people's video cards while they're not playing games.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Oh please. We have cpu time for 10c an hour over at Andrea Arcangeli's CPUShare website:
...
http://www.cpushare.com/
Still experimental for now but soon
I did some math and I will build a server farm if I can get a steady 10c/hr/processor.
PenGun
Do What Now
Oh comon, they are just trying to cover-up getting slashdotted!
New.com article "Sun Grid hit by network attack" : http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-6052968.html
Horns are really just a broken halo.